HOME / fraywatch: What's happening in our readers' forum.

Keeping the FaithConsidering the religion of our next president.

Compiled by Adam ChristianPosted Saturday, Dec. 23, 2006, at 10:47 AM ET

(Continued from page 4)

RSS

Fingerpuppet astutely describes the facile (and ultimately dangerous) sense of moral superiority that we feel when the N-word is invoked too liberally:

Part of the problem with this taboo against using the Nazis as a basis of comparison is that in doing so, we've essentially dehumanized them. Everyone can feel so smugly superior to those mid-century German monsters that we automatically assume that none of us is prone to the same foibles and moral weakness. In treating the Nazis as such a special case, we've largely inoculated ourselves from taking this history lesson sincerely to heart. Nazism is not a quantum leap beyond our own humanity. It's made up of all the petty impulses of ordinary people, from every-day racism to the semantic contortions of State Department bureaucrats who turn their backs on wholesale slaughter when they refuse to utter the word "Genocide." Nazism just happened to be a sort of perfect storm of all of these smaller elements. We should all be aware of how venturing out on to the slippery slopes of fascism, even rhetorically or incrementally, puts us at least partially in league with butchers and tyrants throughout history.

While attacking McWhorter's criticism of the Bush administration as "a mere scorecard, a laundry list of perceived similarities (and exaggerated ones at that)," Tennjed acknowledges the power of such comparisons for both ends of the political spectrum:

There is NO taboo against using the word "Nazi" or referring to Hitler. Conservatives do it all the time when they talk about the dangers of appeasement or compare their opponents to Neville Chamberlain. Hitler is fair game for discussion. The problem is not merely using Hitler's name, but using Hitler's name in a way that is intellectually and morally unserious.

For his part, Rrhain finds all the parallels he needs in American history itself, without recourse to Nazi Germany:

isn't our own history sufficient to show how horrendous the actions of the current administration are? Do we really need to bring up Nazi Germany when referring to the declaring of US citizens to be "enemy combatants" when our own history of doing that to the Japanese during WWII is just as good an example if not better? Do we really need to reach for the Nazi card when trying to talk about the suspension of habeas corpus and expansion of executive authority when our own history of Lincoln suspending it and being slapped down by the Supreme Court over it is good enough? Why not simply point out the many things that Bush has done and compare them to our own Declaration of Independence?

Now I realize that we have morphed into a society that hyperbolizes everything. The only way to get any attention paid to a story is to use as breathless and apocalypse-invoking language as possible. But that is mostly a declaration of the laziness of the writer. The problem with declaring everything to be the worst thing in the world is that it leaves you nowhere to go.

Except perhaps to the Politics Fray for more debate … and coincidentally, an op-ed piece published in today's Los Angeles Times calls for lifting the censorship ban on the original N-Word. AC … 1:30pm

Tuesday, Nov. 28, 2006

I've come out of this holiday weekend giving thanks for the return of divided government. If nothing else, the coming Democratic Congress has given back a stake in politics to the half of this country who have spent the last four years as helpless observers of national policy. The quality of political forecasting has risen dramatically in the Fray, as both sides of the debates give voice to a newfound sense of excitement and dread.

Responding to Jacob Weisberg's obituary for the conservative era, Jack_Cerf divines a coming fusion of yesterday's "wings":

The alternative Weisberg doesn't see is a combination of cultural conservatism, economic protectionism, and blood and soil nationalism. Pat Buchanan has been arguing for years that if we want to go back to traditional gender roles, where Dad was the breadwinner-patriarch and Mom made the home, we had to go back to an economy when an honest, hardworking Dad could support a stay at home Mom and kids.

The Buchananist coalition is in favor of traditionalist moral values and protection against cheap alien labor abroad and at home: pro-church, pro-tariff, pro-union and anti-immigrant, looking to the government for protection against the boss, the global labor market, Hollywood and Hip Hop. It has the potential to unite much of the Christian Right with a white working class fearful of declining living standards and those African-Americans angry that yet another group of immigrants seems to be passing them by.

Frankly, I think this is Ghost Dance politics, and that the Buchananites can no more return to an imagined 1950s that is gone beyond recall than the Sioux could dance the buffalo back in 1890s. I also think the attempt would command a lot of support and would tend to isolate both the Country Club Republicans who want free trade and cheap labor and the Mandarin Democrats who want free trade and a culture where mere whiteness and maleness have no privilege.